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Netscape Out, iPlanet In
trims wrote to us with the an update on the AOL/Sun/Netscape triumvirate. Quite a lot of people have written that the the products are taking the name iPlanet, but it also appears that the name Netscape itself is being dropped from all but Navigator and Communicator. The article itself talks a bit about open source movement, and how the decision to drop the Netscape name was partly because Netscape had burned so many developers.
Communicator, Navigator, and Netcenter are not part of the Alliance. They retain the Netscape name. Your client is still Netscape.
The reason all of this is happening is that AOL bought Netscape almost entirely for Netcenter, their web site. They honestly didn't care that much about their products and technologies, except maybe Mozilla (which they want to be able to use for future "embedded" type stuff from what I understand). I don't think they would have let Sun use the brand for the server products.
iPlanet is now the name for all of the server products, which didn't have nearly the reputation (think general public, not slashdot readers) that their clients have had. AOL will continue to use the Netscape brand name, but you won't see anything coming from Sun or from the Alliance that says Netscape on it (or so I have been lead to believe).
The name i-Planet was acquired by Sun when they bought a startup last October--see http://www.i-planet.com/ (i-planet, not iplanet). i-Planet had several products. The technology from one of them (which was RemotePassage from i-Planet) was incorporated with some Sun technology and produced a product which you have have heard referred to by one of its many internal names, "sun.net". The name of the actual finished product was changed several times, but eventually they named the product i-Planet.
Now the Alliance thing comes along and they are reusing the name (but without the hyphen now). So the sun.net product is now being re-named; what was the i-Planet software package from Sun is now the iPlanet Webtop from the Sun|Netscape Alliance.
(Incidentally, the webtop is a really nifty product that allows you secure remote access through a firewall via any SSL and Java aware browser; it can tunnel arbitrary protocols via a Java applet in the browser, so you can check your email behind the firewall from any airport net kiosk or similar access point.)
So, this has zilch to do with Mozilla, but it does affect all of the Netscape .* Server products and all of the Netscape .*Xpert products. But you probably don't use those anyway if you read Slashdot.
So much time has gone by since webmonkey did a feature on M5, the party, the resignation, and I remember that as soon as I read that letter from jzw on his site, I immediately wanted to mail him to congratulate him for being such an enthusiastic person, who did so much in the past, but was then obviously going through some very hard shit.
(It was good that I didn't: I'd only got to the bit about jwz@aol.com followed by laughter by then, and further down it said it wasn't really his address...)
But in any case, I don't think netscape developers were "burned".
If Jwz hadn't resigned that day in such a big way, I (and lots of other webmonkey readers, and maybe even slashdot newbies) might never have heard of him. And that is the kind of people the web needs(and I'd name Bill Gates, Linus, Tim berners -lee, and so many more here, even just because they challenge us in positive or negative ways to work harder), because they are ordinary human beings trying to create what they dream is possible. Sometimes they fuck up or leave, but that is *not* burning!!
When we started this company, we were out to change the world. And we did that. Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But we were the ones who actually did it.
The Netscape experience showed, and is still showing us events in computing that are happening for the first time ever, that computing has had no experience of, simply because they were pioneers. Failure as well as success can be inspiring, because we can learn from those errors.
But of course, all this is from a humanistic point of view, not in the sense of organisational management. In that case they may be right, but the strategy of blocking out and trying to forget old mistakes never pays off in the long run. Perhaps the aol/sun/netscape conglomerate should challenge those mistakes instead of trying to cover them up...
Ale
This mozilla bashing going on in the media is so tiring! It comes from two-bit reporters who likely have never seen Mozilla, and are just quoting FUD generated by other two-bit reporters. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. Considering the current incarnation has only been in development for eight or nine months, its make remarkable progress.
I think this is a knee-jerk reaction pushed by Sun to combat the fact that Netscape's name only has consumer value, not developer value which is the target of the "iPlant" marketing program.
I think Sun and AOL/Netscape are trying to take their existing products that aren't necessarily so highly regarded and brand them under another moniker to hide their roots. I'd expect product names to start changing too, so less clue-full developers who aren't watching these things may end up not realizing what the packages they're looking at actually are.
Sun's also in a tough position, as operating systems like Linux are becoming more capable of mission critical applications on Intel, Alpha, and other lower cost hardware. They're losing their monopoly on high-performance fault-tolerant systems.
I think there's also a growing trend (not growing fast enough, however) for companies developing major eApplications (can I coin that term?) to start utilizing network application architects to properly design the software, hardware, and network to provide better reliability, scalability and fault tolerance through intellegent system design rather than purchasing bigger iron. That trend, as it continues, will only serve to hurt Sun/Netscape more, because they're not going to be able to justify their extremely high hardware costs, and can't keep up with the pace of development in packages like Apache and JServ where high-performance fault-tolerant network application architecture is concerned.
I think its going to end up like all the other iProducts, like the iMac, iBook, etc. Marketing, marketing, marketing. With the real value of the product fairly low on technical merits when compared to price of competing products. Management types will like it...